S2 Offers Service for Embedded Development

S2 Technologies has announced a new solution for verifying and testing software for embedded systems that the company refers to Verification-as-Services.
The VaS solution enables software development teams to use their own processes while S2s underlying quality platform creates a shared framework that can be used across all stages of the release cycle, company officials said.

Moreover, S2 officials said that in this era where embedded software developers draw heavily on components provided by numerous suppliers or the open-source community or acquired as commercial libraries, the problem of integrating these components with in-house developed code continues to increase in complexity.

Yet, S2s VaS leverages the best aspects of the SAAS (software-as-a-service) model popularized by companies such as Salesforce.com and managed-services offerings, the company said. VaS eliminates the need for an organization to recruit and retain a large staff of test and verification engineers and managers because S2 provides the required resources and domain expertise. And VaS is a secure, flexible solution that fits into the customers environment, the company said.
Philip Micciche, president and CEO of S2, said most companies dont have the time, money or development resources to staff a new departmentor build up an existing onethat is dedicated to continuous testing of software components.
In addition, software projects generally progress smoothly and quickly through the implementation phase, Micciche said. Then the projects enter long and unpredictable integration and system test phases, with disproportionate time and resources allocated to these late stages.
And often trade-offs must be made, sacrificing either schedule or quality. Achieving a quality release puts a huge strain on the organization, especially fixing last-minute bugs that result in missed schedules. And with the next project, it all starts over again with little hope for improvement.
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So development teams often are not really able to effectively solve the problem because they are trapped in a vicious cycle: They are too busy developing and fixing problems and have no time to do the "heavy lifting" required to implement a verification strategy, Micciche said.
Just adding more people will not solve the problem. What is needed is a sustainable verification platform with reusable test assets that automates early and continuous testing, S2 officials said.
With VaS, all verification activities are codified as part of a monthly subscription service implemented and maintained by S2 that provides complete management of embedded software verification, the company said. This approach eliminates large up-front software license costs and ensures an organization continues to get full value from the solution over time.
S2 testing and integration experts observe and document existing development processes, then integrate the verification platform into the key systems used in those processes. S2 verification experts set up software, processes and reports and execute verification activities as an ongoing service for development groups.
VaS incorporates a scalable infrastructure for early test and validation success. At every stage, development teams will be able to seamlessly blend testing and verification activitiesincluding planning, analysis, test execution and measurementwith the customers embedded software development processes.
By including defect tracking, test-asset development and validation, VaS helps to deliver a common view of quality across disparate parts of an organization during the entire test and integration life cycle, S2 officials said.
VaS provides management-level reports on key testing and integration metrics and helps to incorporate rich diagnostic capabilities such as software analysis, testing automation and management.
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Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.